


into the dark and wonderful unknown

by serendipityful (staircase_wit)



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Post Season Six
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 14:06:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4266057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staircase_wit/pseuds/serendipityful
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Let's get out of here and never look back."</p><p>But they don't. They stay in Greendale, in Colorado, with their mediocre jobs and their creeping loneliness and their strangely codependent attachment to their alma mater. They stay with nothing left to hold on to. Except maybe each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	into the dark and wonderful unknown

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a rush, so there's probably a lot of minor grammar quibbles and what not. If you spot any, please tell me and I'll fix them ASAP.

As far as Britta’s concerned, listening to lonely drunks lamenting their life’s problems was just as good as being a therapist. Not to mention, the tips were amazing. She didn’t even have to smile. A simple, well-meaning _“and how do you feel about that?”_ was enough.

“You are exploiting a generation of hopeless, God-forsaken alcoholics,” Jeff accuses her as he sips his third scotch that night.

Britta is shameless as she pockets the twenty left on the bill. Her last customer has finally managed to stagger himself out of the door, albeit hitting his head on the wall twice in the process. At least, he has his midlife crisis figured out courtesy of the Bartender of the Year. “Like you can talk about exploitation. You used to be a lawyer. Quid pro quo.”

“I _think_ what you meant was the phrase ‘QED,’” Jeff muffles his chuckle with another sip. “But nice try. A minus for effort.”

“You know, I would feel proud of myself, but I have a feeling you say that to all of your students.”

Jeff shakes his head. “Honestly, Britta, I do have standards. What kind of a teacher do you think I am? I only say that to the pretty ones.”

Britta rolls her eyes and continues wiping off the counter. She can’t help but feel silly at how her stomach tingles just a tad from that comment. At thirty-six, she’ll take whatever compliments she can get.

It’s been three months since Abed and Annie left. Jeff spends every night at the bar grading papers and watching Britta solve all of her patrons’ problems. He knows it’s pathetic, how he can’t find anything else to do, but that doesn’t make him seek out new friends or new experiences or even a more fulfilling job. The two of them are stuck in Colorado, as far as he knows, but it’s okay. That’s just the way things are sometimes.

“Are you doing anything later?” He asks her, knowing what the answer will be. It’s still a courtesy to ask though.

“Going home and trying to pretend my roommate isn’t there,” she groans at the thought. Abed and Annie’s replacement is a forty-five year old divorced man trying to reinvent his life and get his degree. He worked as a phone sex operator on the side. Any time after 11 pm was primetime in the mobile entertainment business apparently and he insisted on working at home. “But apart from that, nothing.”

“Well, you know,” the line feels all too familiar on Jeff’s lips. “ _I_ don’t have any roommates…”

She looks back up from the freshly wiped countertop, cocking an eyebrow. There’s a silence between them that Jeff takes for mutual understanding. Finally, Britta sighs. “Okay, fine. Pay your tab, but I have to go feed my cat first.” 

* * *

 

They’ve slept together twice since Abed and Annie left. The first time, Britta swore it was a one-time thing. Then a month alter, at 1 in the morning, Jeff receives a knock on his door and finds his needlessly defiant anarchist friend midway through a rant on how Donald (that was her roommate’s name) kept her up with the sound of his theatrically fake orgasm (“and it’s not even _that_ good!”). What Jeff doesn’t tell her is that this is the most activity he’s had in the last three months. What Britta doesn’t tell him is that she’s in the exact same situation.

“God, what is this stuff?” Britta calls out, as she rummages through his kitchen. JFor the last six years, his dietary habits have not changed and for some reason, Britta is continually surprised by this.

“It’s called being healthy,” Jeff snarks from the living room couch. They had fallen asleep rewatching _Friends_ on Netflix, only so Britta could wax nostalgic about living in New York.

“Kale chips. Edamame. Protein bars.” Britta muttered as if each Trader Joe’s product was a curse word. It was hypocritical, yes, because Britta did love organic food. Or rather the fact that the food was organic. But at seven on a Saturday morning, really all she wanted at this moment was a Pop-Tart.

“There’s cereal in the upper cabinet,” Jeff informs her.

“Your cereal or good cereal?”

“You know, you’re sounding a bit too demanding for someone who doesn’t even live here.”

Britta opens the top cabinet and pulls out a box of Special K. Examining it, she shrugs before deciding it’s decent enough and scoops out a handful into a bowl. A girl’s gotta eat. As she poured the milk (2%, free-range, organic) into the bowl, she calls out to Jeff again, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that.”

He hesitates. “Should I be worried?”

“Shut up,” she says, turning around and walking back to the bedroom. The cereal bowl balances precariously in her hands. “And I think that we should do this more often.”

Jeff considers this. “Interesting. I mean, Abed would say it’s a bit too repetitive of season two— I mean, sophomore year. But Abed’s … not here anymore.” His expression immediately sobers.

“That’s just it!” Britta exclaims, as she settles back onto the bed. “Abed’s not here. Everyone’s gone. My career is horrible. You’re slowly becoming an alcoholic. Let’s just do something that’s fun and simple and makes us happy. No, let’s just do _something_. Period.”

“Wow.” Jeff remarks, looking genuinely impressed at the passion with which she described the suckiness of their lives. “You really hate living with Donald that much?”

Britta shuddered. “God, someone get that man an office at least.”

* * *

 

They agree on once a week. They meet Thursdays because that’s the only night that Britta gets off before midnight (Mondays are reserved for family dinners because that’s how old she is now). Luckily, Jeff’s Friday class starts at 11, so the arrangement works perfectly.

About six weeks into their arrangement, Britta asks if she can go home with him one Tuesday night. Jeff agrees. He doesn’t have anything (or anyone) better to do. Eventually, it becomes a twice a week thing. Britta keeps complaining that Lizzie C was lonely at home, listening to Donald verbally undress his clients.

“It’s a cat, it really doesn’t care about human company,” Jeff pointed out, but he still buys a litter box for his apartment anyways.

Somewhere along the three-month line, it becomes an every other day thing. Then, without them realizing it, it becomes an everyday thing. She doesn’t admit it, but Britta is glad that she has something to look forward to on Monday nights now.

They don’t put a label on it. It’s too casual to call it a relationship, but happened too often to call it nothing. Like the fully-grown, mature adults they are, they resolved to never talk about it at all.

“My super jacked up the rent.” Britta complained taking an angry bite of her strawberry Poptart. All of that caloric goodness. “I can’t make it. I don’t have enough.”

“What about Donald?”

“It turns out, he could pay whole rent all this time. The audio erotica business is apparently really rewarding.”

“So you’re gonna move out?” Jeff asks. Britta nods forlornly. Hesitating, he casts a cursory glance over the apartment. Lizzie C perched like a queen on his couch. Britta’s leather jacket on the floor. The cereal box marked “BRITTA’S COOL, TOTALLY HEALTHY CEREAL” on the counter. “Well okay, until you find your new place, you can crash here. You practically live here already. Your cat poops all over my carpet.”

“ _Lizzie is litter box trained!”_ Britta exclaims, aghast. But in a softer, kinder tone, she adds, “But really though. Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem. Glad to be a friend.”

Britta smiles and drinks her green tea. _Friends_. That was good. Simple. _Friends who sleep together every day_. Yeah, she could deal with that.

The next day, Britta packs up all of her stuff, gives Donald her keys, and takes over Jeff’s apartment. She never ends up finding another apartment.

* * *

 

They never outright _talk_ about it for six months, until Jeff comes home from Greendale one day to find Britta sitting on the couch holding a pregnancy test in her hands.

“Sometimes, they’re a false positive,” he said reassuringly.

“I did the test five times.” Britta says matter-of-factly.

“Oh,”

Jeff stops looking at the positive on the test, instead fixing his gaze on Britta. She is stoic, but still uncertain. She wasn’t that young anymore, but still something about the doubt in her eyes and the way her golden-brown curls framed her face reminded him that she was clueless about this and absolutely terrified.

“Are you going to—“

“I don’t know.” Britta knits her fingers together and presses her thumbs to her chin. She almost appeared to be praying. Finally, she stop staring at the test in her hands and turns to face him head-on. “But I think, I want to keep it.”

More than anything, this answer shocks Jeff. And scares the shit out of him. “I thought you never wanted to be a mom. Rail against the patriarchy and all that.”

“I can be a feminist and a mom.” Britta points out. Her lower lip trembles, but somehow she is firm, assertive in her answer. “I always thought I would hate it. But ever since, Abed left … and Annie too, I guess I kind of missed having someone to look after. And I know it’s crazy, I know I’m completely unprepared. But I think I should try. I think it’s worth it.” She laughs, quietly, softly, in a way that is scared but hopeful at the same time. “Guess I really am getting old.”

“Yeah,” Jeff murmurs. “You’d be a good mom.”

Britta smiles weakly. Hesitating, she added, “And you?”

“Me. Right. It’s mine too.”

“Are you in or are you out? It’s okay if you are.” Britta attempts to diffuse the tension by adding in a mock-boast, “I don’t need no man.”

Jeff sat there in a stupor. On one hand, he was had no idea how to be a father, whether or not he’d even be a good one. He was used to drinking too much scotch and talking up too many pretty girls and being charmingly cavalier. Curse that broken condom.On the other hand, there was Britta. She was thirty-seven. He was forty-two. There weren’t going to be opportunities like this again. She was giving him a chance for them to finally grow up. A chance to not spend the rest of his forties and fifties wasting away his mediocre salary on liver disease.

“Okay.” He grinned. And meant it. “I’m in.”

* * *

 

When they call Shirley to tell her, the first thing she wants to know is if they’re getting married.

“Um.” Britta eloquently responds. She turns to Jeff and they both shake their heads in unison. Turning back to the phone, Britta changes the subject and asks Shirley for pregnancy advice.

After the Week 12 check-up, the two of them are celebrate the healthy (so far) baby by marathoning season eight of _Friends_ and a pizza. Britta’s cravings are mostly for junk food, so Jeff eases his policies just for her. She still works long nights, but the no-alcohol rule doesn’t affect Britta too much because she’s mandated as a bartender to stay sober anyways. Jeff, however, feels guilty and resolves to cut his intake down to one glass a day.

“What should we name it?” Britta asks.

Jeff shrugs. “I don’t know. How did Shirley name her kids?”

“Elijah after the prophet.” Britta began. They were both irreligious, so nope.

“Jordan after the basketball player.” Jeff shook his head. Not much better.

“And Ben. After … Chang.”

“After a sociopath who faked his teaching credentials and tried to murder us.” Jeff muses. “Shirley made a good choice there. Hey, maybe we should name it Shirley.”

“Nah, old person name.” Jeff barely suppresses a laugh, turning to her with a shit-eating grin on his face. Britta catches herself and immediately protests. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean … it has … that _vibe_ … okay, you know what. I give up. Who else is there? Dean? Craig? Is Dean his first name?”

“Please no. Troy?”

“You wanna name our baby after the guy I boned for a year?”

“Fair point. I guess Annie is out too.”

“Abed?”

“Abed’s great.”

“I love Abed.”

“I guess he was kind of like a son to us too.”

“Abed Perry-Winger. Or Winger-Perry. Which sounds better?”

“Actually, it’s kind of weird naming a white baby Abed.”

“What other choice do we have? Pierce?”

“Maybe we could be the narcissists that we are and just name it after ourselves.” Jeff suggests haplessly. “But if it’s a girl, she’s Jefferina because I’m not naming our child after a water filter.”

* * *

 

Jeff is two minutes away from winning the Greendale Kickoff Paintball Tournament when Britta phones him to say that she’s going into labor. He lets Leonard take the winning shot and runs to the hospital, with a paint stain on his crotch.

Twelve hours later, their daughter is born on a September morning. Abed, who has returned with the rest of the former study group for the weekend just to play in the tournament, decides to make a documentary film with the working title of _Birth of Baby Perry-Winger, or Jeff Freaks Out in the Waiting Room_.

They name her Simone after Simone de Beauvoir and the first cat Britta ever owned. Shirley, who spent the majority of the waiting time making trying (and failing) not to express her comments regarding the out of wedlock pregnancy, absolutely melts when she sees the baby. The fact that she’s also the godmother helps. She and Annie faun over the child with a resonant “awwwww”. Annie later approaches Jeff and tells him she’s happy for him. Jeff hugs her in response and tells her the same.

“Jeff, any last words? Winger speech to close out the documentary?” Abed asks, jamming the camera in front of Jeff’s face.

Jeff looks into the lens and gives Abed his widest, million-dollar smile. “I am so fucking terrified for what happens next.”

* * *

 

Britta quits the bartending job soon after. She’d spent weeks seriously debating the possibility of raising a baby in a bar. She was actually optimistic about the process (“there’s a spare room at the back where you can change diapers!” she points out to Jeff who thinks the whole setup is ludicrous). But even she couldn’t kid herself for long.

However, Britta flatly refuses to “stay at home and fulfill every single one of [her] mother’s dreams” and Jeff doesn’t fight her on this. Luckily for her, Duncan’s on sabbatical for a year and his position is unoccupied. Thus they are both at Greendale again, after swearing to leave and never look back. This time though, they don’t mind it so much.

When Jeff has classes, she takes care of Simone, and when Britta has appointments, he does the same. Initially, Britta was silently hoping that the presence of the baby would stop the freshmen groupies from hitting on their Legal Studies 101 professor. But she finds, much to her chagrin and Jeff’s amusement, that Simone only increases their attraction to Jeff.

“Can you blame them?” He tells her, when she complains about it. In return, she swats him a little too hard.

They still never really specified _what_ they were, exactly. They weren’t married or even close to married. All they knew was that they were together and they wanted to be this way for the foreseeable future. That was enough.

And they were school-wide celebrities too. Well, even more so than the Dean’s past glorified PA announcements made them out to be. This time their only claim to fame was sitting in the middle of the cafeteria with a giant rocker and a crying baby. The students thought they were endearing, referred to them as the “Greendale Parents” and to Simone as “Baby Greendale.” The Dean is more than a little peeved, having believed that _he_ and Jeff were the “Campus It Couple” before Britta upstaged him.

At least, he lets her keep her job.

* * *

 

After diaper changing and potty training, first steps and first words, more paintball contests, Simone is suddenly two years old and this is their life.

Jeff is woken up at six in the morning by an aging Lizzie C meandering her way up on their mattress. “Nope. No. Get off,” he whispers through gritted teeth as he scoops the cat up and walks out of the bedroom, placing her down on the couch where she reigned supreme for the last three years. On his way back to the much-desired comfort of the bed, he passes by Simone’s crib. She sleeps through most nights now, which both of them are eternally thankful now. There were times where she howled for hours, vomiting on Jeff’s best shirt nonetheless. There were times, him and Britta argued over diaper duties, neither of them particularly wanting to hold their screaming daughter. There were times he wondered whether or not he was even doing a good job. What did he know about being a good father anyways?

“You’re still here.” Britta told him once, when they were fighting and he was despairingly trying to calm Simone down at the same time. “That’s what counts.”

In the last year, their child has been growing at so fast a rate that Jeff thought it was unnatural (“Maybe there was like a weird mutation gene that’s making her into a giant,” Britta says one day just to tease him). But still, somehow, in her crib, she looked so small, so innocent. She has Britta’s blonde, curly hair and Jeff’s nose. Everyday he prays, really hard, to the gods of heredity for Simone not to inherit his forehead. So far, it looks to be working.

Jeff steps into the bathroom for a second to wash his face and when he finishes using the towel, he looks into the mirror with a lurch in his stomach. His hair is _so_ grey. Too grey. He’s 45 now and there more wrinkles on his forehead than he’d like to admit. His muscles get sore more easily and the bags under his eyes exacerbated by nights of comforting a crying baby. It fills him with a certain melancholia just looking at his reflection now.

Sighing, Jeff tiptoes his way back to the bedroom, with a single glare at Lizzie C to remind her to stay on the couch. He slips back under the covers as quietly as he can, but Britta is still stirred awake by the interference.

“Whaaaaaa?” She croaks out groggily. She’s never too alert in the mornings.

“Nothing.” Jeff reassures her, though he can’t hide the undercurrent of sadness that ripples through his voice.

“Okay. Cool.” She mumbles and closes her eyes again. “Cool, cool … cool …”

Jeff watches her sleep, listens to her slow, quiet breathing. She’s still so small next to him, a head shorter, but with twice the fire. Her eye bags are just as worn out as his and he can’t help noticing that her halo of curls has more than a few strands of grey in there.

Almost instinctively, he touches his own hand to the nape of his neck, to his own greying hair. And he smiles. It’s okay. 

* * *

 

Somehow things just keep happening too fast for them to keep track of. Britta rallies fiercely against buying a house in the suburbs, so they get a bigger apartment. Lizzie C dies, so they take home a three-legged kitten that they name Carrie Chapman Catt. Yes, they do call her Catt. Simone starts preschool. They file the adoption papers for a Jordanian baby boy. Britta promises to teach little Abed all about the Arab Spring and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“Big Abed” wins a Peabody for his web series about a community college study group. Annie goes deep undercover and they don’t hear from her for three years. Shirley opens up three branches of her sandwich shop and is looking to expand to China. Troy got _married_ , a fact they still cannot process.

And after five years of undemanding, intellectually lacking work, Jeff and Britta decide to leave Greendale. The decision was mutual and the process like gently shedding an old skin. They decide to go to Washington because on their budget, and with two kids, that’s about the most “wild adventure” they can afford. Britta lines up a job at a local practice, Jeff has a post at a community college in Seattle. The Dean hosts a Bon Voyage party on a ship in the middle of the Greendale Parking Lot. After he gave a teary-eyed, chokey rendition of “My Heart Will Go On,” he referred to the boat as the Titanic “sweeping them into new and supposedly better adventures.” Britta is convinced the boat is a metaphor for their relationship.

They never do get married. But that doesn’t matter. Because for once they leave, precocious preschooler and adopted baby in the backseat, and they never look back.

* * *

 

“Come on, how much you wanna bet that our six-year-old actually wants to eat Fiber-Grain Wheat Oat Muesli?” The petite blonde woman in Aisle 11 scoffs to the tall man beside her.

“As opposed to this? Organic Frosties?” He points accusingly at the box that the woman is holding. “I can taste the irony from here.”

“It’s _all-natural_ sugar!” The woman snaps. “It’s totally healthy.”

“Says the grown woman who eats children’s cereal.”

“It’s a statement of solidarity with the kids.”

“Sure.”

Their argument grows louder and louder, until the rest of the supermarket is staring at them. Like a bad traffic accident, it was impolite to stare, but somehow it compelled their eyes. They couldn’t help it. It was fascinating.

“Um,” an elderly woman approaches Customer Services, delicately grasping onto a heavy and comically large bag of groceries. “Should I file a complaint or…”

The red-aproned employee shakes his head, looking over at the bickering couple with fond exasperation. “Don’t worry, ma’am. They do this every week. They always compromise and buy both packs of cereal instead.”

“Oh, okay,” the woman nods as if she understands (but she really doesn’t). “Every week, are you serious?”

Yes. Every week for the rest of their lives.

 


End file.
